I... am... Powerful!!!!

... and other incoherencies of the day.

Dear honored ladies and gentlefolk, it has been concurred and confirmed: I am officially insane. See me incohere. The green silly went sideways upside wrong. Sbee em myst=pe. See me do utterly complete nonsense. rhubarbrhubarbrhubarbrhubarb. Oh, medication tish-tosh. It's so nice to be insane sometimes.

*sigh*

Because my play is... Queso!

Yessiree, it is 100% unadulterated, fully concentrated queso. It's cheese, cheese, glorious cheese! It's more than cheddar, it's mozzarella!

I have plowed through four, no, five play ideas, and now, I have come to my might-be last. (Yes, Dean, I had to change that play I sent you. I'm sorry.) In its stead, I surrendered to the class a love-story to rend limb from limb ("as 'inspired' by Long Walk to Forever by Kurt Vonnegut jr. Oh no. The man will never forgive me. Pardon the mometary mirage of vanity.) An uber-cheesy love-story, but a love-story none the less. (Oh Jonette, where have all your writing sensibilities gone to?)

And yes, two major points:

ONE: It's cheesy.
TWO: Okay, so it's a love story. Now what?

Well, then.

One, it's cheesy. Pang-telenobela. Kulang ng theatric element. Magbasa ka na lang ng romance pocketbook. Even Mr. Vonnegut's name loosely tied to it will not save it. Shame, shame, mooching glamour and canon standing off a living legend.

I confess, through my own most grevious fault.

Now, that can be easily arranged.

Two: it's a love story. Now what?
Or would the more appropriate question be, "and so?"

As I've had to be told, I've got to have something new to offer audiences. If it's going to be merely about two people who try to look back and take a chance to love each other again, I'm going to have half a house snoozing in no time. (I say half a house because the other half has supposedly left the building to do something better, like have a smoke.) My classmates began rattling off suggestions one after the other. As it happened...

Classmate1: What i the guy was a girl, and it was a lesbian thing? Or vice-versa?

Classmate2: Or maybe what if the girl just got married to her someone else, and your lead guy still came for the wedding?

Classmate3: Or what if your lead guy gives up, and he answers one of the problems in the wedding without the girl knowong, like, for flowers?

Classmate1: What if your guy was a girl, and your girl was a guy, so the girl would actually be the one trying to convince the guy to get out of the marriage?

Classmate3: But that's My Best Friend's Wedding.

Classmate1: Ay, oo nga. Hmm... or maybe kunwari, your guy's a hitman and then the girl's his next paid-for victim, tapos lalabas ang CSI Miami, tapos, si Tom Cruise galng sa MI2, tapos action movie na pala ito...

Ehem.

Well, if that's the case... it just hit me, waiting to have 3pm lunch with a good friend of mine, Rosa...

What if we put in a robot angle?

Suddenly Vonnegut's EPICAC, Steven Speilberg's A.I. and Shirow Masamune's Ghost in the Shell begin to sound very, very good.

Oh, boy.

I've learned an important lesson with this course.

There's a difference, writing short stories, and writing plays.

With writing a short story, you can construct a ten-pager with a man just sitting in his chair, and thinking.
A novel might involve his whoel day business. Virginia Woolfe did that. The ten-or-so pager, that I can easily cope with.

As for plays, you need to have a keen sense of the passage of event-to-event action, give it a play-by-play account. Add up the events, keep the tension high, never let it drop. I think I understand the concept of high drama, if high drama is taking the tensions throughout the play and adding them all up to one great ka-pow in the end. And here, I flounder.

Then of course, one will never know if she is really a lousy playwright if one does not try her best.
So there.